But with the wife, she uses a computer and she watches streaming TV, it would be a hassle.
My sisters have their cell phone as their main number and they pay their provider for that. It’s not bad, as far as costs go.
I can use my Visible wireless phone to get on the web.
It is very fast to the phone itself but they slow it down
if you connect your PC to the phone with wifi.. just 5kbps
... but it is unlimited at that snail’s pace on the hotspot.
It’s fast enough to stream video but not in hi def.
Visible wireless 25 dollars a month.
Not an expert with Tracfone specifically or what device you are using. But you’re gonna want to look to see if you can add a “mobile hotspot” feature to your plan. When you enable mobile hotspot in your settings, you phone will broadcast a wifi connection like you’d see in any place with wifi.
On your phone, you would likely configure your hotspot settings to include a secure passkey to only allow you or other authorized people to use it.
In my opinion, mobile hotspot generally doesn’t perform well enough to serve as your primary internet access. And if you have data limits, stuff like streaming can run you through it quite quickly. You’d want to make sure you understand any overage rates if any apply.
The mobile hotspot feature is nice for occasions like traveling when you may have a couple devices like tablets, laptops, etc that don’t have a built-in cell connection.
Probably a lot of folks here smarter and with better advice than me. But I hope this helps.
Look at T Mobile Magenta plan for Seniors. You’ll get better service and it will cost less
If you want to use your phone as your home internet, the first thing you need to find out is if your provider (Tracfone) and the phone you have are capable of being used as a local “hot spot.”
Second, you need to find out what sort of data plan you have, how many Megabytes per month you’re allowed to use, how fast is the service, and does your plan throttle your data rate during peak times.
Third, you need to determine how you wish to use the internet. Web surfing Free Republic (relatively low data usage,) or streaming video services such as Netflix, YouTube, etc. (very high data rate usage and probably not supported for very long under most plans.)
I’m no expert but I’ve seen ads on my TV from T-Mobile telling you to use their system as your home internet connection.I’ve read that such a setup can be unreliable.
I have Tracfone service and use it as an internet connection a bit. It is easy to burn through the data use on my plan and I have had to add data a time or two. If Tracfone offers a plan with unlimited data, that might the way to go.
My BIL ( with TMobile) uses his phone more for internet than phone calls. No idea what his cost is but I assume he has unlimited call, text and data.
I spent over a year working from home out in the sticks before retiring, using Verizon cellular data.
Depending on the structure you might consider a cellular booster/repeater. I got ours from the RepeaterStore.
Living under a tin roof, getting a signal good enough for data is a challenge. The repeater has an external antenna you direct towards the closest cell tower (for your particular service) and then there is a antenna inside the structure that transmits a boosted cell signal to your phone.
You then run your internet on the phone's hotspot.
We've now moved into our barndominium and it's like a huge Faraday cage. The repeater is absolutely necessary to use a phone.
I use mine as a backup all the time.
You’ll need to ditch the TracFone and go with their sister company Straight Talk with an unlimited data plan with a hotspot or something similar.
Hotspot and data plan, a really big data plan. Verizon also offers a 5G Home Internet and LTE Home Internet
If you have the Sprint network available in your neighborhood, you can get a mobile hotspot with NO DATA CAPS or throttling for $400 per Year.
Something like Textnow, free with local number on smartphone where you need internet connection ?
It may not be a factor for you, but because I’m hard of hearing, it made a big difference for me. The sound quality of my iPhone is miles ahead of the Tracphones I used to have. Also, getting and maintaining a signal with the Tracphone was much harder.
If you have a landline, you should be able to get DSL.
We used DSL as our Internet connection for years. It’s fast enough to stream movies.
Plus, since it is a landline, your phone and Internet still work when the cell towers go down.
In the years before we got Starlink, we used a cellular router for internet and phone service. A cell router is a router that also has a slot for a cell phone SIM. I built a high gain external antenna for the cell router (Mofinetworks 4500 and later 5500). This served internet to the computers and phones in the house via ethernet and wifi.
Since we could not use the weak cell signal in the house we used wifi calling for phone service.
Now we use Starlink for this.
In my area you have a choice of cable or nothing. The cell phone coverage in the area is spotty to say the least.